17. Grainger, Karen. First order and second order politeness: Institutional and intercultural contexts. In Linguistic Politeness Research Group (Eds.), Discursive approaches to politeness. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. – 167-188 p.

The interest in politeness as social norms goes back to the times of ancient rhetoric. Each era had its norms of politeness. And each norm had its specific features in different communities.

It is only in the 1970s that various accounts of the so-called linguistic “politeness phenomenon” have been presented. Early studies tended to claim, implicitly or explicitly, the universality of the principles underlying politeness phenomenon. In the following years, however, scholars from various cultural backgrounds challenged this universal view with what they claim to be evidence from their own languages.

Since then, a plethora of work has been done in the domain of what is called linguistic politeness. This led to a lot of confusion in the literature about this topic among researchers and theorists who have each a different view and conception about it. Like the different classifications of politeness and the issues in giving one concise definition of the term „concept‟.

Politeness is a culturally embedded notion. The extensive literature on this line of argument supports this well. To examine the actual manifestations of politeness in various languages and cultures is just to look at social behaviors of the speakers of those languages; what these speakers do when they communicate with one another, and what their values are.

Being polite is a complicated matter in any language. It is difficult to be learned because it involves understanding not only the language but also the social and the cultural values of the community. And language can not be separated from the community who use it. Moreover, using language must be appropriate with the social context of the speaker. The important characteristics of the social context is the context of the person spoken to, and in particular, the role relationships and relative status of the participants in a discourse [20, p. 146]. The speech between individuals of unequal rank (due to status in organization, age, social class, education, or some other factors), for example, is likely to be less relaxed and more formal than between equals. Conversely, the speech will be relaxed whenever it happens between individuals with the same or equal ranks.

Brown and Levinson stated that politeness strategies are developed in order to save the hearer’s “face”. Face refers to the respect that an individual has for him or herself, and the maintaining of “self esteem” in public or in private situations. In this case, usually the speakers try to avoid embarrassing other person, or making him feel uncomfortable. Politeness strategies are used by people to ensure a smooth communication and harmonious interpersonal relationship in non-hostile social communication. Those strategies are used for calling forms of oral and written communication. People can communicate in written formby many kinds of medium; one of them is in fiction, drama being one of its celebrated genres.

Before the advent of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, it was assumed that there were no stylistic tools suitable for the analysis of dramatic texts. Stylisticians were also not used to investigating pieces of texts longer than lyric poems. Moreover, spoken language – which is what is imitated in plays – was generally seen as stylistically and aesthetically debased in comparison with, for example, poetry.

Early work in stylistics focused primarily on the analysis of the formal limguistic elements of texts – for example, grammatical forms, phonological features and propositional meanings. Many poems have a single – tier discourse architecture in which the poet addresses the reader directly. This makes a stylistic analysis of such texts relatively straightforward(at least in methodological terms), since it involves identifying stylistic effects at just one discourse level [27, p. 100].

During the 1970s and 1980s, advances in pragmatics (broadly speaking, the study of how context affect meaning) increased the scope of what stylistics was able to achieve. Previously, while the techniques of grammatical analysis had been available to help stylisticians uncover such aspects of text structure as viewpoint, the tools were not available to reveal the source of interpretative effects deriving from dialogue. For this reason, work on the stylistics of drama to some extent stalled, especially by comparison with work on the stylistics of prose and poetry [27, p. 101].

Stylistic investigation of dramatic dialogue is not pursued as frequently as analyses of narrative fiction or lyric poetry until fairly recently. Now, there has developed an extensive focus on the stylistic analysis of dramatic dialogue, and, with the potential of the interdisciplinary character of stylistic firmly acknowledged, the stylistic tool kit for the analysis of dramatic dialogue has been considerably broadened, embracing, for example, pragmatics, corpus, cognitive and multimodal stylistic approaches.

Many literary critical investigations of play-texts have focused not so much on the systematic linguistic analysis of the language of plays or on performative aspects, but, for example, on themes displayed in the textual material. Stylisticians have stressed that the dramatic text itself is a more stable object of analysis than performance. Most recently, however, stylistic approaches to dramatic discourse have attempted to stress the importance and interplay of drama as text and performance and to enhance its systematic analysis by including the multimodality of drama as discourse [4, 9, 31].

It is interesting to choose a play as a literary work to be investigated by using pragmatics studies on politeness strategies. The language of the play has a clear elaborated context that support the story explicitly and also tells us how people are interesting in each other within the play through the portrayed characters, so the story can be easily understood. This context is important to determine the politeness strategies used in the discourse of the play.

The phenomenon of politeness strategies can be encountered in any context of conversation. The play as the subject of this research serves as a conversation in which the politeness strategies occur. And Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is the most conducive for the phenomena under study and is the material of this diploma paper.